Theolog

The Apostle Paul’s Priestly Ministry – Romans 15.15-19

by Mark Bonnington, 18 Jul 2007

The idea of calling Christian leaders or ministers ‘priests’ has had a long and somewhat controversial history in Christian theology. Against the medieval Catholic and entirely post-biblical idea of calling ministers ‘priests’, evangelicals have insisted since the Reformation on the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. In response, some denominations, rather than a full frontal attack on the priesthood of all believers, have undermined it instead by addition - insisting that there exists a ‘special ministerial priesthood’ of Christian ministers.

To avoid this kind of theological sleight of hand perhaps we should also insist just as firmly on a corresponding and balancing doctrine: the doctrine of the laity of all believers – since the word laity comes from the Greek laos (=people) and refers to the people of God to which every believer belongs. I remember one minister friend visibly blanching at the suggestion that they ought to consider themselves one of the ‘laity’. Their reaction revealed the fact that they actually believed themselves to be different to other Christians, not just in function or ministry but in status and in kind.

In fact there is not much at all in the NT material on the matter of ministers as priests. That the early Christians didn’t think of their ministers as priests is quite understandable. They knew what a priest was: a priest was a person who offered a sacrifice. And the early Christians were famous precisely for not doing what other religions, both Jewish and pagan, did in their temples: offering animal sacrifices. Jesus Christ was the new Temple and the final sacrificial death for the sins of the world. And so priestly language is rare in the NT except in connection with priestly ministry of Jesus, of which Hebrews is such a powerful exposition.

Nevertheless, in one text Paul does speak explicitly of his ministry as priesthood. He writes in Romans that his ministry by God’s grace is ‘to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified (made holy) by the Holy Spirit’ (Romans 15.15). The idea is very simple: the apostle’s mission to the Gentiles was priestly service, the offering of a holy sacrifice to God. When the gentiles turn to Christ through Paul’s preaching, their lives become an offering made by Paul to God. The offering is made holy or acceptable to God by the fact that they are given the Holy Spirit when they respond to the gospel. Now because of this work of winning obedience from the gentiles (15.18) ‘by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God…’, his gentile converts are a fragrant offering to God.

To put it most briefly: mission in the power of the Spirit is a priestly ministry. When people respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ and they are sanctified by the Holy Spirit, their lives are being offered to God as a sacrifice.

The same theme is, of course, found in Paul’s more famous appeal in Romans 12.1 that the Roman Christians present their bodies as ‘a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable worship (latreia)’. If I have heard this verse referred to or preached on once I’ve heard it a hundred times. On all but one occasion that I can remember the preceding context was completely ignored. The opening conjunction of the verse (‘oun’ in Greek - ‘then’ or ‘therefore’) ought to give us a clue that the preceding context is important, especially amongst Christians so keen on the little saying that ‘a text without a context is a pretext’.

Although Romans 12.1 is often applied to Christian discipleship in general, it actually focuses on the response of the gentiles to Paul’s gospel. He begins Romans 12.1 with: ‘Therefore by the mercies of God…’. These are not mercies in general, but the divine mercies upon the gentiles of including them in the covenant, mercies that Paul has been recounting and explaining in the previous three chapters, Romans 9-11.

What follows after Romans 12.1 confirms that Paul was writing specifically of the Roman believers as part of the offering of the gentiles in the same way as in Romans 15.15. Romans 12.3 reads: ‘for by the grace of God given to me …’. This is exactly the same wording he uses in Romans 15.14. It is the same grace which he speaks of in Galatians 1.15-16: grace that not only brought about his conversion on the Damascus Road, but was also his commissioning to preach Christ amongst the gentiles.

The emphasis in Romans 12 is different to that in Romans 15. In Romans 12 the emphasis is on the sacrifice: the life of faith which we gentile believers live in every generation is a sacrifice to God - lives made holy by the sanctifying Spirit at work in us. In Romans 15 the emphasis is on the priestly work involved: to preach the gospel among the nations is to engage in a truly and properly priestly task.

Just as in the OT the priests in the Temple mediated between heaven and earth, so in mission we mediate between heaven and earth. Just as the Temple was the place where earth touched heaven, so in mission, heaven touches earth when people’s lives are transformed in the power of the Spirit. Just as the Hebrew priests stood in the place where God deals with human sin, so in mission we proclaim the death of Jesus as the place where sin is dealt with and people sanctified.

It is common today for the priestly task of the people of God, their work of intercession, to be seen in terms of prayer for our world. Such prayer is essential – it is a Christian work which we are instructed by Scripture to undertake. But what Paul suggests to us in Romans 15 we need to hear with great clarity: the priestly work of today’s Church is not principally done in prayer, but in mission. In the living and proclaiming of the gospel amongst the nations we are involved in the priestly task of mediating heaven to earth. Mission is priesthood – the priestly work of calling the nations to the worship of the living God.